


Ways to Make it Through the Wall

by levendis



Series: Prompt Fics [45]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Hopeful Ending, Light Angst, Moving On, Moving Out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 04:01:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5482541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Those who can't figure out their mistakes are doomed to repeat them: The Doctor, the Axis, and an infinite amount of chances to screw up all over again. Post-"Hell Bent"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ways to Make it Through the Wall

**Author's Note:**

> for anon, who requested: Clara regenerated in a time lord but is having a hard time adjusting to the biology of things: not so many sleep, sensing the universe moving all the time, fast thoughts, oh, and of course, being able to psych communicate and finding out that getting her mind too tangled into the doctor's is not the best way to keep secret thoughts

The Axis is long-abandoned. Still fully-functioning, though, which is nice, since he isn’t in the mood to spend time and effort whipping it back into shape. Besides, he’s not entirely sure how it works. Not that he’d admit to that, if anyone asks. Thankfully, there’s no one here to question him.

The life support kicks in as he steps out of the TARDIS door. Lights flicker on. The flat taste of recycled air. The odd bounciness of cheap artificial gravity. The impersonal blankness of everything. Impermeable, uninterested in his presence. Everything is white, too bright, and that’s familiar in a way that many things are lately. Like it’s something out of a book he once read.

The waiting room at the center of time. All it's missing is a tinny piped-in rendition of “Girl From Ipanema” on perpetual loop. Around him, hallways spoke off, branching into other hallways, and on and on. An infinite amount of doors, leading to an infinite amount of universes. Aborted timelines, things that weren’t or were once but it had been decided they shouldn’t be. Paths not taken, choices made differently. Hingepoints to futures that someone had been arrogant enough, and once powerful enough, to cut off at the root. To quarantine.

Which is apropos, because he does feel like an infection sometimes. Now especially, in this place, dusty and sloppy and too emotional and too confused about what it is he’s emotional about, the muddy boot in the prim-and-proper foyer. Something to be cleaned up, spat out.

Maybe he’s getting a little too self-pitying. He vaguely feels like he might have earned it, though.

 

He picks a door at random. Opens it. Everything through the doorway is very pink. There’s a woman standing a few feet away, looking incredibly put-out.

He knows her. He _knows_ her.

“I’m looking for the Hand of Omega,” he says abruptly. “Trying to get it before the other chap does. Don’t suppose you’ve seen it?”

She shakes her head. She’s in her dressing-gown, he realizes. He is in her bedroom.

“Ta,” he says weakly, and then re-opens the portal, diving through it with all the grace of a gazelle, if the limbs of the gazelle were slightly smaller gazelles.

 

* * *

 

He picks the next door slightly less at random. It’s not that he knows what he’s looking for, but…he totally knows what he’s looking for. Wouldn’t cop to it, but he does. The Axis shifts around him, aligning itself to his unvoiced specifications.

He’s in an apartment. Not a bedroom, at least, just a living room. But she’s there. The woman.

 _Clara_ , he reminds himself. He holds the name close but does not say it aloud.

She looks blindsided. She’s wearing sweatpants, holding a rubber spatula. She breathes in sharply. “ _You._ But it can’t be. You died, on that space station, you died and you, you - why are you here?”

He shrugs. “I got lost,” he says.

She’s circling around him. Cautious, wary. It’s a good tactic to take, he should be proud.

“Clara, is everything alright?” A voice from a neighboring room, husky, feminine.

Something clicks in his head. He knows who that voice belongs to. By now he recognizes that tone, the core of it - took a few billion years, but no one’s perfect.

He hurriedly opens the portal, hands fumbling the sonic screwdriver, and steps backwards into it. The universe closes over her baffled expression, her hand reaching out.

“I’m sorry,” he says as the rift snaps shut. “I shouldn’t have done this.”

 

* * *

 

“So I died and I regenerated and everything improved markedly.” He pauses, adjusts the timbre of his voice. The acoustics here are terrible for monologues.

“Is it me? Specifically me? Is there something wrong with this incarnation? Would the universe be better off if I were someone else? Is it as simple as that?”

 

* * *

 

The next door leads to Gallifrey. A Gallifrey, anyway. He knows before he’s over the threshold. There’s a smell to the place, always is. No matter the universe.

He spends half an hour looking half-heartedly for the Hand and then tracks her down. Of course she’s here. The Axis is giving him what he wants.

“You’re back early,” she says. And she pulls him into her house, into their house. Her hands warm and small over his. And she kisses him.

He leans into it, or tries to at least. She’s busy leaning back.

“You’re not you. You-you, I mean. You’re all wrong.” She’s still holding his hands.

He can feel her - she’s all wrong too - double heart beat, the symbiotic nucleus, the tether between her and time -

“You’re a Time Lord,” he blurts out.

“Time Lady, yes.” She lets his hands go. “You’re not from here, are you.” She’s speaking slowly, like she’s working the thought out as she goes. Stumbling over a new language.

“No.”

“And you’re broken.” Seems like both their verbal filters are on the blink. She reaches up and puts her hand gently on his face, fingers splayed on his jaw.

It feels like a key sliding into a lock but not turning. It feels very nearly familiar.

The look of concentration on her face, also something he senses he ought to recognize. And the rough, untrained mental presence, bleeding through her skin, into his body and mind and soul, filling him up until he feels like he’ll burst apart -

She yanks her hand back like she was burned. She seems embarrassed, and frustrated, and deeply apologetic. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m so sorry. I’ve been working on controlling it but it’s still so much. Are you alright?”

He sways on his feet, feeling impossibly empty. He musters up a smile, and nods. “I shouldn’t be here. I should go.” His voice sounds foreign to his own ears, distant and strange and so terribly small.

 

* * *

 

“It wasn’t me,” he announces.

The Axis hums indifferently in response.

“So what was it, then?” He’s yelling now, which he can do because no one is here to tell him off for not using his Inside Voice.

“And why is this-” He points vehemently down at the ground. “-Happening again? I’ve done this once already, and it ended horribly. Get a new plot.”

 

* * *

 

 _You’re repeating yourself,_ the chalkboard says.

“Yes. Clearly. We’ve established that.”

The message is underlined, and underlined again.

 

* * *

 

He finds the Hand of Omega in a version of reality where Gallifreyans have two, and occasionally three, heads. He slips in with the invisibility watch, cracks the safe, and carefully cocoons the Hand in a portable anomaly-containment device. He’ll build a room for it on the TARDIS, it’ll be safe as long as he’s around to protect it.

He has what he came for. He should stop now. He should leave this place and stop himself from ever coming back, except in the case of an extreme emergency.

He doesn’t, obviously.

 

* * *

 

In the next timeline, Clara is dead.

He meets himself for lunch. They stay on opposite ends of the table, a safe distance apart. Nursing twin mugs of hot cocoa, with the little marshmallows. Other-him picks at a cinnamon bun.

“So.”

“You could have saved her,” he says angrily. The elderly couple at the next table shoots them a look. “Twins! Just two twin brothers having a little tiff. Nothing to worry about.”

Other-him wipes his hands on his hoodie, crumbs going everywhere. He rolls his eyes. “Inside voice,” he says.

He - the One True him - also rolls his eyes, but more artfully and efficiently. He leans in and lowers his voice to a whisper. “Why didn’t you save her?”

“You don’t need to whisper. Just don’t shout. What is it with me and moderation?”

He glares, fighting the feeling of something fraying inside him.

Other-him sighs, slumps down in his chair, twists at his ring. “It would have torn the universe apart.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Clara’s death was a fixed point.”

“No such thing.”

“It wasn’t what she would have wanted.” Other-him is raising his voice now, too, and he visibly pulls himself together, calms himself down. Like it’s a trick he’s learned.

“How do you know? Did you ask? Or did you just assume, like you always do.” A key in a lock, but it’s not _turning_ -

“No,” Inferior-him admits. “But you can’t consent when you’re dead.”

“So you ask ahead of time. You plan.”

Jerk-him huffs out a laugh, like ‘ha ha, plans, us planning things, can you imagine.’

He presses on. “You commit. You stick to it, no matter how much it hurts. It’s a choice. And you make it.”

The version of himself who made a different choice stares back at him steadily. Almost sympathetically.

 

* * *

 

In the next timeline, Clara has never met him. This hurts nearly as much as her being dead. He understands that it’s more than a little hypocritical of him to be so wounded, considering the circumstances.

He meets her as a normal human man might meet a normal human woman. Possibly he shouldn’t have actually called himself a normal human man out loud.

“Just two normal humans,” Clara says. She’s humoring him, or maybe a little intrigued, or both. “On a date. In a car park. Is the ‘something amazing’ you wanted to show me your penis? Because if it is, I’ll mace you and kick you in the testicles so hard you’ll be singing soprano for the rest of your life.”

He glances over at the TARDIS. “Yeah, I’m suddenly realizing how this looks. Sorry. I must seem like a nutter. One of _those_ people, you know.”

“Hey, I realized the implications straight off the bat and I still followed you. We’re in this together.”

Something inside him clicking, and clicking, and not quite fitting, and his hearts ache at how far away it all still is. At how she’s not _for_ him, at the way her face scrunches up, big head and tiny nose, how she’s shivering in the night air but doing her damnedest not to show it.

“Oh, Clara.” He lets out a particular breath he’s been holding for a very, very long time. “It’s Venus,” he says, pointing up at the sky. “We’re far enough away from the light pollution here that we can see it.”

She looks confused, but cranes her neck up. “Where?”

He steps closer. Too close, really. Near enough he can feel the heat from her body, hear her heartbeat. He takes her by the hand and guides her arm up, the line of sight. “Right there. The bright one. D'you see?”

He can sense that she’s entirely unsure as to why she’s standing in a car park with a strange man, looking at the slightly-brighter speck in a sky full of specks. He knows she’s the sort of person who would rather see things up close.

And he hopes she’s never taken to heart that whole 'the star has probably died by the time its light reaches Earth' thing. It’s a terrible piece of information that’s only technically true. He hopes she’s kept a sense of wonder, and he hopes she loves stories more than facts, and he hopes she’s happy here on Alternate Earth #97q6-whatever.

“I should go,” he says softly. “It’s time for me to go home, I think.”

 

* * *

 

He leaves the Axis where he found it, mostly. Sets himself adrift, the TARDIS going where she will. He feels like he ought to be going somewhere in particular. He vaguely feels like he hasn’t earned it yet, though.

Somewhere random, then. An anywhere, an anywhen. A Christmas, maybe; those are usually fun. And he could do with some cheer. Good things happen during Christmases, he thinks. Probably. Worth a shot, anyway.


End file.
